'Way Down East eBook

“I certainly do like wedding cake, Anna, but
then, I like everything to eat. Some folks don’t
like one thing, some folks don’t like another.
Difference between them an’ me is, I like everything.”

Anna laughed in spite of herself.

“Yes, since I like everything, and I like it
all the time, why, I ain’t more than swallowed
the last buckwheat for breakfast, than I am ready
for dinner. You don’t s’pose I’m
sick or anything, do you, Anna?”

“I don’t think the symptoms sound alarming,
Hi.”

“Well, you take a load off my mind, Anna, cause
I was getting scared about myself.” Seeing
the empty water-pail, Hi refilled it and carried it
in the house for Anna. Dave was not the only
one in that household who was miserable, owing to
Cupid’s unaccountable antics. Professor
Sterling, the well-paying summer boarder, continued
to remain with the Bartletts, though summer, the happy
season during which the rustic may square his grudge
with the city man within his gates, had long since
passed.

The professor had spared enough time from his bugs
and beetles to notice how blue Kate’s eyes were,
and how luxurious her hair; then he had also, with
some misgivings, regarded his own in the mirror, with
the unassuring result that his hair was thinning on
top and his eyes looked old through his gold-bowed
spectacles.

The discovery did not meet with the indifference one
might have expected on the part of the conscientious
entomologist. He fell even to the depths of
reading hair-restoring circulars and he spent considerable
time debating whether he should change his spectacles
for a pince-nez.

The spectacles, however, continued to do their work
nobly for the professor, not only assisting him to
make his scientific observations on the habits of
a potato-bug in captivity, but showing him with far
more clearness that Kate Brewster and Lennox Sanderson
contrived to spend a great deal of time in each other’s
society, and that both seemed to enjoy the time thus
spent.

The professor went back to his beetles, but they palled.
The most gorgeous butterfly ever constructed had
not one-tenth the charm for him that was contained
in a glance of Kate Brewster’s eyes, or a glimpse
of her golden head as she flitted about the house.
And so the autumn waned.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE QUALITY OF MERCY

“Teach me to feel another’s
woe,
To hide the fault I see;
That mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me.”—­Pope.

Sanderson, during his visits to the Bartlett farm—­and
they became more frequent as time went on—­would
look at Anna with cold curiosity, not unmixed with
contempt, when by chance they happened to be alone
for a moment. But the girl never displayed by
so much as the quiver of an eye-lash that she had
ever seen him before.

Had Lennox Sanderson been capable of fathoming Anna
Moore, or even of reading her present marble look
or tone, he would have seen that he had little to
apprehend from her beyond contempt, a thing he would
not in the least have minded; but he was cunning,
and like the cunning shallow. So he began to
formulate plans for making things even with Anna—­in
other words, buying her off.